Monthly Archives: August 2011

An Appreciation of Theodore Roethke, by William Seaton

(William Seaton of Goshen is a poet, translator, reading series host, former teacher in prison and graduate school, and one of the most knowledgeable people about poetry whom I have the pleasure of knowing in the Hudson Valley. Let me … Continue reading

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The Complete Chronogram Quips by Phillip Levine

Some people have weekly therapy. Or tennis match. Or drumming circle, poker game, or facial. For years, Woodstock had its own weekly Dada in the form of Monday night open mike at the Colony Cafe. The night I’ll never forget … Continue reading

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Down with Poetry. Up with Judy Lechner.

Why do people find it so easy to say that they don’t read poetry? After all, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t like music, though they’d clarify what they enjoy, such as jazz, classical, or rock. And … Continue reading

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God, Lynn Domina, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

My late friend and poetry mentor, Saul Bennett, though deeply immersed in his Jewish heritage that began with his boyhood in Sunnyside, Queens during World War Two, loved no poet as much as Gerard Manley Hopkins, the little Jesuit priest … Continue reading

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In Praise of Overwriting (If you’re Gerard Manley Hopkins)

(The Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins died age forty five in 1889, leaving behind poems that weren’t published for another thirty years, when his efforts to reinvigorate poetry that had been trapped in Victorian decorum and predictable traditional meters were … Continue reading

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“The Crow” By Kevin Finn

(This review originally appeared on the Ampersand Books blog.) Poems about crows, like crows themselves, appear everywhere, brusque heralds of mortality. Here’s a good one from Exit Wounds, a short chapbook by Kevin Finn, a native of Pittsburgh: The Crow … Continue reading

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What Would Sparrow Say?

During a dinner conversation about the politics of poetry reputations, Barbara Louise Ungar and Stuart Bartow implanted a new fear in me: “What would Sparrow say?” In America: A Prophecy: A Sparrow Reader, their friend, the white-bearded, sometimes barefooted, always … Continue reading

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“How I Became a Writer” By Michael Perkins

(Michael Perkins, my good friend and co-author of Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town, wrote this brief memoir as an introduction for an unpublished sampler taken from his novels, plays, reviews, and poems. … Continue reading

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Michael Perkins’s “Overlook Mountain Invocation”

For the finale of our book launch party for Michael Perkins’ Carpe Diem: New and Selected Poems, I read Michael’s poem, “Overlook Mountain Invocation,” which, I should admit, he dedicated to me, though I would dedicated it in turn to … Continue reading

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Gray Jacobik’s “Little Boy Blue”

Is poetry true? That has been an awkward question since my poems sound so autobiographical. I often start with memories then freely invent to round out a story that would be only a fragment if I stuck to the journalistic … Continue reading

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